Most Recent Content-
- Tuesday, Jan 19, 2010
ZNet Article Jyoti Basu (1914-2010) slipped into the night. He was a lifelong Marxist and Communist, and was the Chief Minister of Bengal from 1977 to 2000. Basu's service to Communism and to Bengal was equivalent: he wavered from neither. -
- Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
ZNet Article Kashmir hangs over Mumbai, whose Gateway to India accepted the assailants who struck a year ago today. It haunts it. -
- Saturday, Nov 07, 2009
ZNet Article Raul Prebisch was not born in Buenos Aires. His father was a German immigrant who married into a declasse branch of a prominent Argentine family. Advantages did not come to him by the accident of birth. He had to make his own career, pushing against insuperable odds in a society given over to the bloodlines of the haute bourgeoisie. Coming to the capital from provincial Tucuman, Prebisch studied hard, avoiding all society for the library. He caught the eye of liberal intellectuals who hailed from among the privileged but were in search of talent among those who had few connections. They took him up and pushed him into their circles. -
- Monday, Oct 05, 2009
ZNet Article Rajendra Pachauri heads TERI, The Energy and Resources Institute, based in New Delhi. An engineer of the railways in his early career, Pachauri went to the United States to earn a PhD in industrial engineering and another in economics, after which he returned to India in 1981 to work with TERI. In 1995, he joined the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a lead author; in 2002, he was elected the chair of the IPCC. Its work and his leadership (along with that of former US Vice-President Al Gore) were recognised with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Pachauri is currently the head of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute, part of Yale University in the US. He spoke with Himal Southasian contributing editor Vijay Prashad in mid-September. -
- Sunday, Jul 05, 2009
Video On January 3, 2009 Historians Against the War met at the Sheraton in New York City during the annual convention of the American Historical Association for a panel discussion on "The Bush-Cheney Administration." -
- Sunday, Apr 26, 2009
ZNet Article President Barack Obama inherited two seemingly intractable wars, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, alongside a financial crisis that continues to escalate. Obama positioned himself against the unpopular Iraq war, but he did not place himself in the anti-war camp. It had become strategically important for his electoral success to make the claim that President George W. Bush’s adventure in Iraq had reduced the pressure on Al Qaeda and that it therefore increased the insecurity of the United States. -
- Sunday, Mar 01, 2009
ZMag Article A review of a book by Vijay Prashad in the People's History series -
- Sunday, Jan 18, 2009
ZNet Article Israeli contempt for the United Nations begins in the 1940s and continues to this day... -
- Saturday, Dec 27, 2008
Commentary On Thursday, November 27, in the middle of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Imran Babar, one of the terrorists, called India TV from Nariman House. He used a cellphone that belonged to Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, the co-director of the Chabad-Lubavitch Center. The following day, Babar and his associates killed Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka. The phone call he made was not long. Babar opened with a comment that made little sense to most people: "You call [Israel's] army staff to visit Kashmir. Who are they to come to J &K [Jammu and Kashmir]? This is a matter between us and Hindus, the Hindu government. Why does Israel come here?" -
- Wednesday, Nov 12, 2008
  ZNet Article Barack Obama has appointed John Podesta to run his transition. During the lean years of the Bush administration, Podesta, native of Chicago, ran a shadow cabinet for the Democrats. Since 2003, the home of this government-in-exile has been the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank set-up to rival the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. The money, about $10 million per year, came from George Soros, Peter Lewis, Marion Sandler and Herb Sandler – the main liberal financiers. CAP has its set of fellows. Many of them worked in some capacity within the Clinton administration (where Podesta was Chief of Staff). There are hard-nosed people like Rudy deLeon (who went through every Defense secretariat in the Clinton years) and Jeanne Lambrew (who served as a health analyst in the National Economic Council during the waning years of the Clinton administration). But there are also the fresh faces, young people who came to Washington with glowing references from the Ivy League. Others marched over from the Hill, after serving various terms as staff members for the Democratic warhorses. They have been groomed to be part of the next Democratic administration. Their hibernation is over. Obama has called. -
- Saturday, Oct 25, 2008
ZNet Article The deepening financial crisis in the U.S. forces the neoconservatives to reverse their policies. -
- Monday, Sep 29, 2008
 Commentary Che was fated to the mythic. Even his birthday attached him to a long tradition of popular struggle: he was born on Bastille Day, the commemoration of the opening of the French Revolution. [Some doubt that this was his actual birthday; his parents might have picked it to disguise a pregnancy that began before their marriage]. In life, he was larger than life. Handsome and brave, an intellectual with a gun and machete who was at the same time able to talk easily about love for humanity: all this enhanced his appeal. He becomes iconic with the 1961 picture by Alberto Korda. It went from the pages of Revolución (April 16) to posters across the planet. Three decades after its first appearance, I bought a hand-printed poster from a left-wing bookstall in Caracas' Central University. The students who sold it had an air of the guerrillero heroico among them as well. The same year as Korda's picture flew around the world, Jean-Paul Sartre published a brief book on Cuba. He marveled at the Revolution's youth. "These young people form a discrete cult of energy, so much loved by Stendhal. But don't think that they talk about it, that they theorize it. They live energy, they exercise it, they invent it, perhaps. They prove it with its effects, but they don't breathe a word about it. Their energy manifests itself." Che embodied energy, and it is this that was seized upon by young people who made him an icon, and it is what sustains his special attachment in the hearts of the young. Youth sees in this forever youthful revolutionary the spark that sustains them in unsettled times. -
- Thursday, Sep 18, 2008
Commentary Hidden in the bowels of the University of Iowa library are the papers of Lement Harris (1904-2002). Harris came from money (his father co-founded Texaco) and he took his degree from Harvard. When he graduated in 1926 he decided to avoid the careers associated with his class and went to work on a Pennsylvania farm. During this three-year sojourn, Lem, as he was called, read the agrarian pacifism of Tolstoy and Gandhi, and met a worker who had been to the Soviet Union. Lem contacted Harold Ware, an old IWW hand and communist, who ran a farm south of Moscow in Verblud (camel). Ware, the son of “Mother” Bloor, transplanted American technology to Soviet farms (particularly the tractor) and did so with a team of radical American farmers (including six from North Dakota’s Non-Partisan League). Lem arrived at Verblud in June 1929 (there is some terrific material in the J. B. Davidson papers, also at Iowa, including the pictures that you can see in Deborah Fitzgerald’s useful book, Every Farm a Factory). Lem’s experience on Ware’s farm changed him, and he became a lifelong communist. -
- Saturday, Sep 06, 2008
ZNet Article In the 2004 general election, the Indian electorate denied the intransigent right-wing power over the State. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance lost out to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, although the latter were also short of a majority in the 545 seat lower house of Parliament. To gain a comfortable majority, the UPA turned to the regional parties as well as to the Left Front. Forged over the past three decades, the Left Front includes four parties, two of them Communist Parties (the CPIM and the CPI) and the other two left-of-center political formations. With sixty-one seats in the parliament, the Left was able to give the UPA its majority. -
- Friday, Sep 05, 2008
Commentary Rosa Clemente, 35, is the vice presidential candidate for the Green Party of the United States. Clemente, who is Puerto Rican, was born in the South Bronx, New York, and educated at the University of Albany and at Cornell University. A vibrant community organizer and feisty journalist, Clemente co-founded the National Hip Hop Political Convention. The Green Party's presidential candidate is Cynthia McKinney, former two-term Congresswoman from Georgia. In May 2007, McKinney left the Democratic Party at an anti-war rally in front of the Pentagon. "As an American of conscience," she said, "I hereby declare my independence from every bomb dropped, every civil liberties rollback, every child killed, every veteran maimed, every man tortured. And I sadly declare my independence from the leaders who let it happen." -
- Saturday, Jun 14, 2008
Commentary After a brief fourteen-minute speech on June 12, Nepal's last King of the 239 year Shah dynasty, Gyanendra, departed from the side entrance of the Narayanhiti Palace to live out his days in the former summer home of his ancestors. "I have done all I can to cooperate with the government's directives," he said as the reporters and onlookers scuffled with each other to get a good shot of his momentous occasion. "The monarchy in Nepal has always been with the people of Nepal in good times and bad times." At least in his departure the universally despised Gyanendra offered some humility, although the monarchy was generally the architect of the bad times while its members and their A-Class Rana bureaucrats enjoyed the good times. -
- Thursday, May 22, 2008
Commentary When Bill Clinton ran for the White House in 1992, I was deeply annoyed. He represented so much that we, on the left, despised: the reaction within the ranks of the Democratic Party's elite that wanted to "save" the party from what it saw as the excesses of a combination of the New Left, the already declining trade unions, and, most importantly, the Rainbow cultivated and mobilized by Jesse Jackson's two runs for the presidency (1984 and 1988). -
- Sunday, Mar 23, 2008
Commentary Barack Obama's suggestion that he would sit down and talk with the Iranian Prime Minister is perhaps the most sensible policy proposal in the stale foreign policy air of Washington, DC. Twice before Teheran has publicly reached out to the US, but both times it has been rebuffed. In 1998, Iranian President Mohammed Khatami proposed a "dialogue among civilization," which the UN adopted in 2001 as its theme for the year. Washington ignored the move, and turned its back on Khatami's 2003 proposal that the US and Iran begin serious negotiations toward normal relations. In 2006, Iran's current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent President Bush a lengthy letter with "new ways" forward for the two countries. Bush, like Clinton before him, snubbed his nose eastwards. Washington's refusal to talk to Iran is stubbornly myopic. -
- Wednesday, Mar 19, 2008
Commentary A fractured electorate cannot unite behind candidates. The Republicans have their candidate (Boom, Boom McCain). The Democrats are divided by age, gender and race. In the murky results and polls it is hard to fathom the outcome. What is clear is that the Democratic race has mobilized vast numbers of previously disenchanted people to the polls. Some of this is the special charisma of Obama, but quite a lot of it is the general enthusiasm to vote for the first woman or the first African American with a shot at sitting behind the big desk in the Oval Office.
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- Wednesday, Jan 30, 2008
Commentary No more the black sails, the fierce cries, the blood lust. Now the pirates ride small motorboats, silent, armed especially with cell phones, GPS systems and automatic weapons. By stealth the boats come right up to the rudder of the cargo vessel, some pirates board thanks to help from someone aboard, and they quickly, bloodlessly, plunder the cargo. Then they are off, to the small island towns. Here it is much as it was before. Money runs through their fingers like quicksilver: sex, drugs, drink and other forms of violence to the body. Little remains for them, as they turn back to their motorboats for another run at the sea. -
- Tuesday, Dec 25, 2007
Commentary The first car bomb exploded on Wall Street. It was set there by an Italian American anarchist, Mario Buda, in solidarity with Sacco and Vanzetti. Forty people died on that September 1920 day, and the assassin fled the country for his native Italy. J. P. Morgan's son was injured, and Joseph Kennedy was shaken up. Nonetheless, writes Mike Davis in his catalogue history (Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, Verso, 2007), "a poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of scrap metal, and an old horse had managed to bring unprecedented terror to the inner sanctum of American capitalism -
- Saturday, Dec 01, 2007
ZMag Article Call it the curse of Columbus. The conquistadors came to what would be called the Americas in search of gold, god, and glory. Gold they found, eventually, and between the sword and the crucifix they brought God as well. It was harder to measure glory—to have one’s name engraved on the landscape gives you posterity. But to get there, one would have to spill blood without mercy. -
- Thursday, Nov 15, 2007
Commentary I read the introduction of Iran's president by Columbia's president with embarrassment. "You exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,"said Lee Bollinger... -
- Thursday, Oct 25, 2007
ZNet Article On October 12, 2007, the Congress Party threw in the towel. India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the leader of the United Progressive Alliance Sonia Gandhi told the press that they would step back from the US-India nuclear deal. "If the deal does not come through," Singh said plaintively, "that is not the end of life. In politics, we must survive short-term battles to address long-term concerns." The short-term battle was won by the Communists, who led the opposition to the deal and winnowed regional parties away from the Congress and toward their position. The Communists' stance is that the nuclear deal (set in motion in 2005) is only one part of a wider embrace between the Indian and US governments, and between Indian and US-based corporations. Apart from nuclear cooperation, the alliance is geared toward partnership between India and the US in democracy promotion, the opening up of the Indian economy to unleashed turbo-capitalism, and a strategic military alliance. The US architects of this linkage saw the last point as the lever: US State Department official Christina Rocca said (in 2002), "Military-to-military cooperation is now producing tangible progress towards [the] objective [of] strategic, diplomatic and political cooperation as well as sound economic ties." Wal-Mart would follow the USS Nimitz into Chennai harbor. Seen in this way, the Communist challenge is not restricted to the nuclear deal, although its defeat gives momentum to wider struggles against the drawing in of India to the platform of US-led imperialism. -
- Wednesday, Oct 24, 2007
Commentary The Generals are jumping ship. Retired Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, onetime head of the US army in Iraq, is the latest to put daylight between himself and the White House. The Bush team, he said in early October, is "incompetent and corrupt." Their policies in the Iraq sector, he pointed out, would have earned them a court martial had they been in the military. -
- Friday, Oct 12, 2007
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Vijay Prashad's Bio Info: Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner ... moreVijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History, Professor and Director of the International Studies Program at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. He is the author of a dozen books, including most recently The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007; in paperback in 2008). Two of his previous books were chosen by the Village Voice as books of the year (Karma of Brown Folk, 2000; Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity, 2001). He is an editor or a contributing editor for Himal South Asia (Kathamandu, Nepal), Amerasia Journal (Los Angeles, CA), and Left History (Canada). He writes a regular column for Frontline (India), and occasionally for www.counterpunch.org. He is on the board of the Center for Third World Organizing (www.ctwo.org), United for a Fair Economy (www.faireconomy.org) and the National Priorities Project (www.nationalpriorities.org). lessMy ZSpace FriendsRecent Friends Messages
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